I mean the kind of dark matter the physicists and cosmologists now say may make up a very large percentage of the universe, since without its existence, the galaxies we've discovered via the better-seeing new telescopes like Hubble and Chandra etc. would fly apart. There is not enough gravity, as in from Newton's Law of, to hold them together. Or something like that. I am neither a physicist nor a cosmologist so it's hard for me to read about this stuff much less explain it.
A word or two of background as to how and why I got interested in this stuff in the first place. For starters, it's "dark matter". How could a mystery writer not be intrigued? And there's the fact that astronomy has always interested me, from earliest childhood. I don't know how old I was when I used to pull the National Geographic magazines off the shelf in my grandfather's study and sit there on the rug looking at pictures of the stars, but for certain it was before I could read and I learned to read at 5, so .... The one I remember best was called the Spiral of Andromeda. Now I know that's the galaxy nearest to us; then it was only the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and I was vastly disappointed when I couldn't see it myself up there with the Big Dipper and Orion and all the rest, that I'd need a telescope. I could go on with memories of this nature because I have many, but you get the idea.
Well, a couple of years ago I thought I might write a book about the year 2012 and tie it to dark matter somehow, so I did a lot of research. I read a ton of books - - maybe I should say I tried to read them because none of them were easy going, and I about broke my brain over string theory. (Anyone reading this who has ever read any of this stuff yourself, please note I said I broke my brain not my brane.
Here is what I propose, having read all the scientific stuff to the best of my ability: WHAT IF (you know the author's what if, don't you) the stuff that there is so much of but we can't see it is spirit, not matter? What if there is a whole spiritual realm so vast that it has cumulative weight?
If you think about it for a while with something like an open mind, and can get past the fact that we live in such a science-dominated age that all of us tend to have caught the scientific bias of needing visible, repeatable proof, then you have to admit it's possible.
What if there really are beings of individual personality and intelligence that have never had bodies and don't even want them? What if these beings are the origin of our belief in angels, which is almost a universal belief among humans of all cultures and all periods of history? I tend to believe that things that have often been repeated in mythology, especially mythologies that have formed the basis of religions, are there because they do in some form actually exist and we human beings have a sort of race-memory of those elements embedded in us somehow, maybe in our very genetic codes. We all have some ideas of things invisible that are nevertheless real. It's just that the true nature of those things eludes us, so that many of us end up denying their existence.
I am not really going anywhere with this proposal that dark matter is spiritual stuff, though I played with it for a while in terms of a novel. Some of the ideas I played with, the ones related to 2012, I'm putting into the book I'm working on now, which may or may not ever be finished. Even while I was reading and formulating my ideas, I had a hunch that these physicists and cosmologists were over-thinking the whole thing. From a commonsense point of view, I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps Isaac Newton, smart fellow though he was, might not have come up with a law that works in our solar system but not necessarily outside of it. The existence of dark matter isn't necessary to postulate within the solar system, it's only when you get to those galaxies -- and I guess within our own Milky Way -- that you need dark matter so that Newton's laws will continue to work.
Small moment of digression: I continue to be blown away by the fact that we call our galaxy the Milky Way, and one of the great wall sculptures at that ancient temple in Cambodia [whose name escapes me but will probably come to mind as soon as I get away from the computer] is called Churning the Sea of Milk. It's one of the great Hindu myths about the creation of the world. That's an example of what I mean about the truths being in the great old stories. And that temple is Angkor Wat. I didn't remember it, exactly, I remembered it's in Graham Hancock's book Heaven's Mirror, which is a lovely book even if he is a bit of a kook. So I looked it up. There's a whole chapter on Churning the Sea of Milk in there.
Now bringing this up to date and to a close: In yesterday's mail, after I'd said I was going to write about dark matter in this blog, I got something from Scientific American, a Special Report (their caps) titled Does Dark Matter Really Exist? It seems there is an Israeli physicist named Mordehai Milgrom who proposed, all the way back in the 80s, that Newton's Law of Gravity doesn't work at vast distances. He came up with something called MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics, which makes the existence of dark matter unnecessary. The more the new telescopes discover, the more his MOND is proving out -- though there are a lot of people in his own profession who won't accept it.
And so it goes.... (with apologies to Linda Ellerbee, who was smart to grab that expression for her own).
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